EP 215: Pay it forward - leadership with Dr. Kevin Gazzara
Dr. Kevin Gazzara is the CEO of Magna Leadership Solutions. He is Management & Leadership Expert, Executive Positive Intelligence Coach, Professor at 5 Universities, Speaker and Author of The Leader of OZ.
Kevin worked for 18 years at Intel Corporation in positions from Program and Product Management to Leadership Development. He holds a Bachelor in Science in Commerce and Engineering, an MBA and a Doctorate of Management in Organizational Leadership.
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EP 215: Pay it forward - leadership with Dr. Kevin Gazzara
Dr. Kevin Gazzara is the CEO of Magna Leadership Solutions. He is Management & Leadership Expert, Executive Positive Intelligence Coach, Professor at 5 Universities, Speaker and Author of The Leader of OZ.
Kevin worked for 18 years at Intel Corporation in positions from Program and Product Management to Leadership Development. He holds a Bachelor in Science in Commerce and Engineering, an MBA and a Doctorate of Management in Organizational Leadership.
In the wide ranging conversation we cover 3 key points.
A leadership view at the mass layoffs in tech early 2023 and what that means for organizations and ourselves
Leaderships styles and how leaders can enable organizations to innovate
Learning organizations how they work how to build them and the Task Quotient where Kevin shares a free assessment that the listeners can use to find out what tasks they are thriving at
Guest Links:
Kevin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevingazzara/
Kevin on Twitter @doctorkevin https://twitter.com/doctorkevin
Magna Leadership: https://magnaleadership.com/
Magna Leadership on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MagnaLeadership
The TASK QUOTIENT SPECIAL LINK http://www.magnaleader.co/GIFT
Books mentioned:
The Fifth Discipline: Art and Practice of the Learning Organization
https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Discipline-Practice-Learning-Organization/dp/071269885X
Breakthrough Performance: Managing for Speed and Flexibility
https://www.amazon.com/Breakthrough-Performance-Managing-Speed-Flexibility/dp/188293900X
Flow: The Psychology of Happiness
Link to the show:
Please find all resources like video, audio, show notes and as well some shorter clips of the episode at the show page: https://www.jensheitland.com/podcasthome
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Transcript:
(This Transcript is AI generated)
EP215-Kevin Gazsara
Hello and welcome to the Human Innovation Podcast, the podcast for innovative leaders. I am your host Jens Heitland and today my guest is Dr. Kevin Gazzara.
Kevin is the CEO of Magna Leadership Solutions, Management and leadership expert, executive positive intelligence coach, professor at five University's speaker and author of the Leaders of OZZ. Kevin worked for 18 years at the Intel Corporation and positions from program and product management to leadership development. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Commerce and Engineering and an MBA and Doctorate of Management and Organizational leadership. In today's episode, we will cover three main points, the mass layoffs in tech early 2023, leadership styles for innovators and learning organizations, including the task quotient and the link Kevin shares for you to do a free assessment of yourself. Please welcome to the show, Dr. Kevin Gazzara.
Hello Kevin. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
Hi, Jens. Fantastic. I can't wait to have this conversation between the two of us.
Yeah. Looking forward to learn from you specifically about leadership today. But before we go into this tell us a little bit about yourself.
Who are you and how did you get to where you are today?
Born and raised in the Philadelphia area. Did my undergraduate work in engineering and business and did my MBA with a focus in business as well. And then went off and did all my doctoral work in management and organizational leadership. I spent about 30 years in corporate America, 10 years with a company called Deal of doing heavy equipment, as a product manager, project manager, development manager. I was a GM for them and then back in the late eighties, I had the opportunity to join Intel and I spent my last 18 years of my corporate life with Intel.
Very similar, came in as a marketing engineer. Worked to a product manager, then was an ops manager, and I ran a small division. But the big thing was is I spent the last 10 years managing Intel University and managing Intel's management and leadership development. And that's really where I found my passion, right, that I moved over as my engineering buddies would say is moved over to the dark side of going from the technical side, would say love the bits and bites, managing product design teams. But what I really found was I love developing managers and leaders. And that's one of the reasons I went back to school and did my doctorate in that as well as move from, the technical side in Intel to the human side. So it's been wonderful. But I had a personal goal that I wanted to retire at 50, or I wanted to leave the corporate world at 50 so I could give back.
I wanted to work with small to medium sized organizations that didn't have 10 million budgets and to develop their leaders and really help them get better. In 2007, myself and two of my colleagues we left Intel, whether you wanna call it re resigned or retired or whatever, it's just after my 50th birthday and for the last 15 years while we created a, an organization called Magna Leadership Solutions, and for the last 15 years we've been doing just what I had hoped we would do.
We do executive coaching and we have all these leadership programs, and we do facilitation and speaking. So every day I get to do whatever I love to do. And really helped, we've worked with dozens of companies and thousands of people I think really helped them develop their own personal leadership styles and make a difference to the, the team, not, not only individually but personally and help make organizations more successful from a business perspective.
In addition to doing all that, I'm been at a professor at six universities and teaching this stuff. I have a tendency not to sleep a whole lot. .
Yeah. If you ask my daughters, she will say the same. And she's five now. .
Well, fortunately my daughters are 40 and 37, so now I have to just worry about the two little grandsons I have.
beautiful. . So before we go into a topic which is current to the situation where a couple of companies are in there was a topic which I would like to bring in the task quotient. Tell us a little bit about that and or how do we build that into the end?
Ah, okay. So the task question or what I call TQ, came out of all the doctoral work that I had done for my dissertation.
And it deals with the concept of flow and getting a balance desirable tasks to keep us individually motivated and engaged. And for the listeners we'll, I'll give the listeners a free link at the end of the session so that they can take the assessment without paying for it.
Normally it's a paid assessment that they can take it so they can identify their ideal task mixture, which will guarantee them. More motivation, engagement and empowerment for themselves. And let's weave that in to, I think the third topic that we're gonna talk about. I think it's a really good bit there.
Great. So let's go with the topic that's burning in the moment. We read and see that in the news quite a bit. A lot of companies specifically in big tech are doing big layoffs in the moment. We're recording this early 2023, and I just have a couple of statistics. Google laid off 12,000 employees, Spotify, 6,000, Microsoft, 10,000.
Amazon is planning to lay off 18,000 employees. That's a massive layoff wave that's going on right now. And of course there's always the leadership angle and how do you treat people that you are laying off. So I want to pick a little bit your brain. How do you see this, how it maybe can be done better for the employees?
And what's your general opinion on that? Let's start high level. What, what do you think about this lay of waves? What have you heard and what's your opinion on that?
Well I think everything is a cycle that I think organizations, particularly high tech organizations, know, like when I was at Intel, I think they try to do a very job for their employees.
And I think, one of the things that, that I learned from being in High Tech for 18 years was that. , the, the worst thing to happen is, is not having sufficient people, sufficient products, sufficient services to meet your needs. So I think the tendency is that when upsides are anticipated and they don't come to fruition, like what we're seeing today, that, that organizations would rather be a little overstaffed than understaffed.
Because when, if it's, if you're understaffed and, and the situation is the same for everyone, then, then it's musical chairs and everyone is trying to get the same people and you have, one person for every 10 jobs, that's a bad situation to be in. Now with that said, I think the, I think you have to also look at things in context that if you look at these large organizations, you're talking a hundred, 200,000 people in many situations.
So even though 10,000 sounds massive, it's could be 5% or, or 10% or some something that like that of the organization that's generally somewhat healthy organization that has some fluctuation e either way. So, so I think it's, I think it's been anticipated, at least I've kind of been anticipating of when it's gonna happen.
And I think one of the things that organizations can do, and I think they do do, if you look inside organizations particularly, exceptional organizations like Microsoft and Google and Intel all great learning organizations. I think many of them really allow focus on the individual to one of the things that we had at Intel was called Own your own Employability.
So once I got the mindset, from day one of like, everyone is replaceable, you need to make personal development. A part of your normal day-to-day activities or week-to-week activities having that mindset so that at any point in time if there was a, a layoff or a downside or whatever you want to call it, that you were prepared for it.
And and, and I think it's, I think many people, particularly in smaller organizations or organizations that aren't learning organizations, they don't take the time to to help people think that way. And those are the organizations or the people are, think, are gonna have a, a bigger, a bigger challenges.
So it's, it's that constant learning, constant development. You mean you have to own your own employability, your own brand. And once I kind of got that mindset, particularly when I joined Intel , it was a good place to be. Intel didn't have layoffs. We had what we called Redeployments where your job went away, and you had was, you had time to go figure out.
I went through three Redeployments. I got really good at that where where the job went away. Like we moved onto different products or moved my product into the Pentium, so that they didn't need a separate co-processor chip together. And I had the opportunity to shut down a division, which was a great experience cuz we got everybody equivalent or be or better job.
So, so ha maintaining that mindset where builds that confidence and you know that you have that flexibility. . So you need also some depth in a certain area but in addition you need breadth, right? So you need to have add additional views into marketplaces and how you can tap into your other skills and so forth.
So I moved my, my engineering skill. I utilized that, but I did my managerial and personal leadership skills. I developed those in, in addition at a time when I didn't absolutely need them. But I could see the value in the future. So very much a future focus. And I think if you do that and if your organization is not doing that, then you need to own that yourself.
And whether it's doing the work inside where companies like Microsoft and Google Intel provide the resources to develop yourself in many areas. So, when you have that cycle hit that you're ready for it. If they're not doing that you really need to do that on your own. And I stress that a lot with a lot of the executives and business owners like Coach.
Yeah. So there're, there're really two parts of that. One is how do you manage that as a leadership team inside of a large organization? How do you prepare individuals to, Hey, there's a wave coming, there's this reason, and then they're announcing that. But as well, if I understand you're right, building already before a culture that enables people to own their own employability.
In a European context, it's more like in an entrepreneurial mindset that you are able to see your worth. But that also means initiative as the individual to say, Hey, I need to put the work in, plus I need to develop myself on a continuous base to be able to be employable and or find an easy job afterwards.
Yeah, yeah. Abs absolutely. And I know, we, I've worked with a lot of companies have European divisions, and I think some of the laws are a little bit different in the US versus Asia and Europe. But I think you're exactly correct you have to kind of own your employability and look for opportunities where you have incredible passion.
Right. For me, I, I was working in a, in a, at the company called Deal Leval, and we were doing steam turbines, compressors, everything was customized. And I had this passion in the eighties when the computers came out.
I had a passion for computers and I had a compassion for doing video production and promotion, those kind of things, completely unrelated to my job. But those are areas that I found my passion and I cultivated. Outside of, of work. So doing a lot of learning and understanding programming and video product, all of that, right?
And I didn't do it with the idea that I had to do this to switch jobs. I just knew that I wanted to be passionate about it. It was something new, other people weren't doing it, so I wanted to be able to do that. And magically, as computers evolved and video evolved, the two merged together.
So it was digital, and by that time I had, significantly more experience than anyone else. Because I was, going after my passion. And, and I, and I would say other people need to, to look at that. It may be a hobby, it might be an interest. The thing is, is many people early on don't take that really long-term view.
And they don't, they, they think, well, my, my job doesn't need this, so I'm not gonna spend any time at it, or I'm gonna spend a minimal amount of time at it. It's like once you really get into it and you get into that zone, kinda, you find that flow and high degree of engagement amazing things happen.
And quite often some of the things that are, quote, unrelated to your job, you can see the, the correlation.
Yeah. I think that's also a little bit of a culture aspect. Growing up in Europe, I just see the media pushing a lot on, hey, the big corporations, they're kicking out so many people. They do the layoff and then remembering myself.
That was early 2000 when I was 23. I guess, I was made redundant from the first company I ever started, which was horrifying for me at that time because I, I didn't have the mindset you just explained. I was just, this is the job I will, I will retire in, because that's what my granddad did and that's how it was, yeah, in Germany at that time.
But in hindsight, I have to say, it was the best thing that ever happened. I wouldn't be here recording a podcast today if I wouldn't have had that opportunity. And then bringing me on a completely different journey over time and living in different countries and having a lot of fun on the way.
Yeah. I mean, I, I believe, and I've always believed stuff happens for a reason.
And, and you can either look at, if you look at whether you have a fixed or a growth mindset I've always had a growth mindset from when I was a kid. I always look at everything as an opportunity rather than as a threat. That's the way our brains communicate to us. And, and, and seeing the glass tap full there's a great statement, I forget who made it.
It's like, one door opens and another, another one door closes, another one opens. But if the door doesn't open, it's just like, make a new door Right. Kind of thing. . Yeah. So, so if you, if you think about that rather than kind of having that myopic view of it's, it's only just. Then you can ex expand out into areas just like you've done that might not have been been experienced because you got into your your father's, your grandfather's process, which I think we were all taught, right?
It's like, you go, you find a good company and they keep, they keep you forever and you retire and you get a gold watch and everybody's happy, and that, that doesn't exist anymore. I, I read an article that said Gen X or Gen Z, the expectation is over the lifetime they'll have 18 jobs, 18 different jobs in that period of time.
I've had, I'm on my one third job, third or fourth job. So, so things are very, very different. So you have to pay attention to the environment.
Yeah. That, that links links very well to our next topic, which is leadership styles. Specifically when we look about How do we enable organizations to innovate?
What are leadership styles in your experience that enable innovation to happen, that enable things to go a little bit more into the risk-taking, opportunity seeking entrepreneurial mindset, which is basically what we just talk about, which if you're an owner of a company, you would love to have people who are doing this, finding new revenue streams and so on.
What do we need to change when we as well look ahead having so many jobs maybe in the future? What are leadership styles you see evolving and or enabling innovation?
Well, I think the challenge has been in the past is, coming through the industrial era, it was very much from a leadership style of command and control, right?
And it was really much more about. Tasks, faster, better, cheaper type type of things. And what's, what's happened is that that's changed over time. I think it started changing, if you go back to the Hawthorne experiment experiments that happened at Westinghouse back in the late thirties social psychologists started recognizing, Hey, if you just pay a little bit of attention to the humans you're gonna get that advantage with them to, for productivity and even creativity.
And I think it's continued to evolve. And now with the, the high degree of automation had just read some a, a book just recently that talked about what has happened in the job market and, and, and it's, it's like a, a, a VC curve, like where we've gone from the need for low impact tasks that there's still lots of jobs there.
As we approach more of the medium skilled tasks, a good portion of that's being replaced by automation or computerization. And then you have the other, other si, the other top of the V, which is the highly skilled non-auto automatable jobs that exist. And the challenge has been that, you know that for the entry level jobs there are lots of current needs, for servers and local workers.
I can't really outsource, my landscaping to, to someone over in the Philippines or India. But I can do that for web development. So what has happened is, is that you have the, on the left hand side, you have these lower skill workers that there's still a nice continuous need for, people that make the stores run or that fill the restaurants or provide local services, public services and so forth, can't really outsourcers that cuz there's a particular physical need.
And then what's happened is, is that as universities have been focusing on gaining a additional skills, things like programming or, customer support, those are more medium level skills that, that require some additional beyond the, the. Type of service skills. And the thing is it's become very, very easy to outsource.
So you have this kind of middle section that's continually shrinking and what we haven't done a really good job of either through education or even through development within organizations of how do you get the people that come in with the lower, relatively medium skill over to a high skill so that they have their irreplaceable that, that you have that degree of confidence and you can allow automation artificial intelligence outsourcing to kind of naturally go where it can go. And at the same point in time, you're, you have developed the other people to, to do, have that creativity, to have that innovation, to be able to bring, the, their, their full selves to the organization.
So, so I think it's, I think it's very much a systems problem, that we that thing, things are evolving and I, I think the challenge is, is things are evolving significantly faster than they ever have in the past. And we just haven't figured out a way to, to catch up. So I think we're, we're constantly catching up.
I've, there's some crazy statistics about the amount of, of information that's available to us and how it's doubling every x amount of days. And, and, we have more information now than, than we had in the last billion years at our finger fingertips, right. That the evolution. Has happened, you have particularly artificial intelligence and if anyone's played with chat g p T, right?
Anyone that's listening, I've been playing with that for the last couple months. There's some, there's just some amazing stuff that's happening and you have to realize that a good portion of that it is finally getting to a level because you have the computing power, which we didn't have many years ago.
To be able to do that will ultimately replace your job. You have to figure out how do you how do you, rather than how do I combat it? You have to figure out how do you play with it nicely. Right. So you can add that additional value. Yeah.
If we link that to us as leaders and leaders of organization, but as well leaders in the manager function. What are the things you believe we need to change to be able to fit into that future?
Well let me, let's, let me finish the last question cuz you just triggered me. I probably didn't finish the last question. So, things were moved from command and control to very much what we would call servant leader model, right?
So servant leadership was made popular, I think in 1970 was when it was kind of first coined by Robert Greenleaf. And, and it's really about, paying attention and doing things for others, right? It's, the best leaders build more leaders rather than just building them themselves. So, so what I think organizations need to do is, Is build the leaders regardless of the position title, right?
So one of the things, so I had two conversations with anyone that I hired at Intel to come work on a, on a team, whether it was in on the technical side or whether it was on the human resource side. And I had two conversations with them one day. One, whether they came in new to the company or they came into a new position and the first conversation was, I don't want you working for me 18 to 24 months from now.
Today is the day to think about what's next, right? So I want you to take I want you to take that mindset because ultimately my goal as a good leader is to develop you in, in a way. And then, and the second thing is, is you need to be thinking at the next level. I want you to be on day one. I want you, regardless of your title, I want you to be thinking about what would Kevin do, or what would that manager working with do?
What would they do? How would they respond to that? And if you don't know, that's your, that's your trigger to, to learn. So I want you to take a leadership stance. You may not have the position. It might be, just process engineer or design engineer, or human resource professional, whatever it is, you need to take that perspective, and my goal is to have this continuous revolving door on my staffs where people were, were getting equivalent or most likely better jobs going out. And I think having, and that's a servant leadership mindset. It's. . It's, it's how do I as a leader help others develop so they add more value?
When I was at Intel I say to people, I had 10 managers in the 18 years I was there.
I had eight just incredible managers and leaders. And I had two other ones that, managers that I learned so much from . That's the nice way of saying it. They were not, yeah, they were not ideal. And many of those people that I learned so much from had this philosophy of like, well, if you know you're developing people to take your job why would they keep you?
And I said, well, if I have my whole staff that anybody could walk into my job. That gives me better opportunities and if I've taught them so that they can really be self-sufficient without me, the value I'm adding is, is the development, the opportunities, it's the breaking down barriers rather than what most managers do, which they act as super individual contributors rather than really managing.
If you pull me out of there Yeah you'll be able to run the, the organization without me. The thing is, is you're, they're people are not gonna continue to develop, so you're not gonna get that leverage factor. So, so if, if you, Mr, or Mrs. Bad manager are concerned about, what happens if they get better than me I'll be insecure.
Then you probably shouldn't be managing people.
Yeah. In my experience and would, would love to get your opinion on that as well. , it's often you reflect that your own insecurity into your leadership style, where you are not sure about what you can contribute. So you are leaning in and you're doing detail tasks, which you as a leader may at least in my opinion, should not do.
You should take care of the totality and help help other people do it. But because you're unsecure in your leadership style, you lean in and you do the task yourself and show everyone how good you are.
Yeah. And there's, there's some really good psychological reasons. If you've, anybody's read a lot of brain science and brain sci psychology, our brains love two things.
First, they love closure. Right? So, so the, the thing is, is typically as the people that you've described, they know what to do. , right? And they know how to get closure for it, right? So they are continually seeking closure. And typically the, as you move up into an organization, you should be responsible for more higher level activities, strategies, and so forth.
And the problem is, is because those have such a long period of time for completion, that our, our brain is saying you're not getting closure. So you need to go do something that can basically proves that you're, that you can you're of value, right? So, so our, our tendency is, is to revert back to the things so we can kind of get those checkoffs.
The second thing to recognize from a brain science perspective is that any gaps that we have in our brain, any unknown information our brain, because of, of how the brain is designed, is, is designed to fill that in with negative information. . Right. It's the reason that, we survived the, the dinosaur age.
Right. , because you, you always wanted to be constantly worried about like, is that Sabertooth Tire going to eat me? That was a good thing. Well, there's, there's not a lot of sabertooth tigers, at least in, in where I live, that are, that are going to eat you that I have to spend most of my time with.
And that kind of leads us into a whole nother topic of the importance of positive intelligence and mindfulness, understanding your emotional intelligence and, doing meditation, those type of things. What happens is if you do that, and that's something I've been a big proponent of in the past several years after I got certified to teach the positive intelligence is that really this mindfulness, this.
I've never been a big fan of like the massive meditation, sitting on the back patio and humming for an hour and clearing your mind. That just never really worked for me. What I found is this, the smaller burst really do work for me. And what happens is, is you build these neuro pathways so that when that.
That blank space comes up and the crowin brain tries to take over that reptilian brain of like, oh, there's something bad's gonna happen. You have to, you're not getting anything done. You're working on the strategy. So, so revert back to what you're doing, right? That, that, that neuro pathway says no, Hey, wait a second here is you have to have faith in moving forward.
And what I'm doing is the right thing, and it's adding that value. And I may not see something in the first 30 days. It might take 60, 90 or, or even a year, but I am contributing at a significantly higher level. And the, the challenge is, from a US perspective, I ha call it the Wall Street model.
The Wall Street model is, what have you done for me in the last 90 days? And a lot of times in many organizations, like, what have you done for me today? And if you only focus there, and you don't focus longer term. Generally you end up get more managers than leaders and, managers manage tasks and leaders lead people.
That's the biggest, that's the biggest challenge. And a lot of times, organizations that have lived in the turn, the crank cause and effect relationship. If I do this, I get that. And they've used that as the method for reward. Typically they may survive short term, long term they're usually in. in very, very different condition so you have to have that faith. In fact, there's an article I'm, I'm working on right now about the difference between correlational and causational managers. So causational managers are the, if then, right?
If I do this, I get that they're usually managers, leaders are more correlational. Like, if I invest the time in here, eventually it's gonna turn out. And I have to have the faith to be able to do that. So if, if you can really build that mindset you can become a great leader. The thing is, is you, you ha you have to do a lot of things to do that, building your skillset.
You have to, reinforce your mind. You have to add that continuous learning. You have to change outlooks. There's lots and lots of stuff that you have to do in a system in order to truly become a great leader and the best leaders kind of. Take all of those into account without trying to be the extreme expert in everything.
Yeah.
And the challenge on top of that is then the organization is sometimes working against it, depending on the organizational culture, like you said, the, the Wall Street model. If you need to deliver the quarterly results, sometimes the, at least the top executives then just put a lot of high pressure on all the others because they need to deliver.
If not, then they're gone and then they're going towards the task management. Yeah,
and the one, one thing I'll say is, what I teach in the university classes as well as the, the leading forward program that we do for, for businesses is the first thing to recognize is that almost a hundred percent of deadlines are arbitrary.
They're all arbitrary. Like the, like, I have to get this, the end of the quarter. I have to have this, the end of the month whatever it is. It's someone that has some idea for whatever reason, and it's usually a cascading problem. My boss is gonna evaluate me here, so I have to evaluate you there and so forth.
And generally I mean, there will be situations. I remember when I was working, with Microsoft, there was, there were certain deadlines of like, this product is getting released and if your code isn't at this level, at this point in time, it's not going in. That was a real deadline because they had already made prior commitments and the announcements were certain dates and so forth.
Most of the time I would say the deadlines are arbitrary. So when you get a deadline, you want to be able to think in a way where you can negotiate that with your boss to really look at the whole system. So it's usually multiple deliverables. And quite often we just think at one, can we, can I get, get a couple extra days or weeks or months to work on it?
And what we don't account for and I, we see this in, in almost every organization that we work with, is that two things. People don't know the amount of time it takes 'em to do their, what we call keep the business running work. Mm-hmm. , right? And they get lots and lots of project work and people take on projects as if they keep, the business running piece is zero hours.
And that's just not realistic. And when you go in and do analysis, you can say, you get your deliverables for the quarter and you have three, three projects you have to deliver. Well, if you're just working on those projects, you can probably get them done. The thing is, is. That there's this expectation that you do all, you're keeping the business running and keeping the customers happy and the products going out and the factory filled and all of that, that, that, because you've been doing that for a while, that will kind of take care of itself.
And that's the furthest thing from the truth that there is. So the first thing that we do is we, we say to people, and I'd say pretty much without equivocation, most people have no idea. It's like, h how many hours do you work that you're just keeping the business running, right? That you have to do the kind of things you have to answer the email and the customer requests and, handle the, handle the challenges and, and do the expense reports, all of that.
How much time does that? and most people have no idea. So first thing we do is we say, okay, for a period of two weeks, normal weeks, not if you're offsite or doing something different than you normally do, I want you to track that. And, and I'd say close to a hundred percent of the time, everyone is outrageously surprised at how much time they're spending.
And realistically quite often it's the, it's the four 40 or 50 hours of a week, right? So, so in addition to that, management has loaded projects on top and they have to deliver. It's like, when are you doing that? So it's all weekends and evenings and, the 40 hour week turns to 50 turns to 60 turns of 70, and the next quarter comes and you've delivered everything.
You're exhausted and it's a rinse and repeat. That happens over and over. So what we asking people to do is figure out how much time you're spending. And really just keeping the business running. And that's the additional time that you would say to your boss, the, these are the, this is the amount of hours that I have to do this project.
I can't do all three. I could do all three if I didn't have the other hours. And have that conversation in a very forward thinking, collaborative way rather than confrontational or not being a good team player. Most people feel like, Hey, I'm not gonna be a good team player if I tell them, screw this, I'm not gonna, I'm only gonna do one of the three projects.
It's like, well, your, your colleagues aren't doing three, so, so you're going to get a really bad review. It's like, yeah, but let's, let's look at the amount of time and the quality and, and so forth. So, so I want to be a, I want to be a team player, not at the expense of your health, your family and the work itself.
Yeah.
So important. , especially in this time where it's just getting faster and faster and faster. Let's move into the organizational perspective of that. How do we build learning organizations specifically towards innovation? A lot of organizations, specifically the large ones have a tendency of not taking risk, have a tendency of not allowing people to do things extra than what their tasks are.
How do we change this and how do we work on enabling organizations to learn on a continuous base?
So first I'll show this prop for those that are listening. So the first thing is, is they need to read this book. And it's the Fifth Discipline by Peter Singy. It was written probably 30 years ago.
Awesome book, and it's really about thinking and systems. And I was fortunate enough there were four of us that at Intel that got certified be by Sangi and his organization to teach systems thinking. I've been teaching that since 1996 both at Intel and with the different clients that we work with.
And the key is that you have to look at things as a total system. And once you do that it really, the book also talks about how do you build a learning organization. And learning organization means that you are, as you have said, young, that you really enable creativity, so you allow people to fail, right?
The key is, you want the failure without the fatality, and the analysis or the the Analogy that I use is, it's like being a juggler that you have a certain number of balls that you can juggle. You start out with one, and then you go to two and three and it continues to build.
And what we have to recognize is, is you have to recognize which are the glass balls and which are the rubber balls. And the tendency is for all of us to think that they're all rubber or they're all glass, right? So certain behavioral styles think everything's glass. So I can't do more than one cuz I could drop it.
The key is, is you want to drop rubber balls cuz it shows you your capacity. You don't wanna drop the glass balls cause you can't replace them. And in a learning organization it really allows enough latitude for people to fail. In fact, that's one of the things I'll say that was really great about Intel when we had a product that failed or didn't meet the expectation I remember one product, we got in very, very deep into the design and we recognize things had changed more quickly in the environment than we could keep up with.
And the product was was not gonna have performance or, or meet the cost need that we had. And I remember them pulling the plug on it, and, and it was really hard for everyone put the, their kind of blood, sweat, and tears into it. Since Intel was a learning organization, what they recognized is we have learned so much.
We actually celebrated that failure. And there's some strange traditions that we had and won't go too much into that. We actually had a coffin and, everybody brought the old materials and the design docs and we put it in there. We said goodbye, and and we really made it we really made it a party.
And realizing that the, the amount of learning that we had from that, the only time that that would be invaluable is if you didn't use it. When we start our next project, what should we do different? Right. And I think many organizations just hold on to the projects just because they have such a high level investment.
And then eventually when it comes out, it's, it's a failure. It doesn't meet expectation or, they don't sell the amount. And I think Intel was very agile. And that may be some of the things that you see with some of the layoffs where they've recognized, Hey, we've done this investment environment has changed, demand has changed.
We, yeah, there's a lot of money. Sometimes it's like it's a billion dollars. We need to pull that. For people that don't have a learning organization. There's a couple easy ways, maybe not easy straightforward ways that you can do, right? First is you have to encourage learning at all levels.
I don't really care whether you're off learning music, when you're doing programming. It's keeping the brain active and creative and so forth. That's the first thing you have to do. Second thing is you have to allow and encourage failures without fatalities, right?
And what intel used to call that. It was I'm trying to think of the exact term. Just escape me. Informed, informed risk-taking, not risk-taking, had to be informed risk-taking. So you had to have some boundaries there. So encourage informed risk-taking. The third thing for the learning organization that you want have is, is that you want to have this cross collaboration and knowledge sharing so that you are you're developing people on multiple levels and it's not just very, very myopic kind of in-depth, and well, that's your job and so forth.
We wrote a really interesting article many years ago, myself and Dr. Le Dr. Ali La who is. One of our original business partners from Intel and anyone that's read Jim Collins' work, about good to Great and getting the right people on the bus, we wrote an article that's just, that's, and if you Google it, you can, I'm sure you can find it's shown up in a couple places.
It's called Throw the Seats Off the Bus. And our philosophy was, and this goes along with the learning organization, our philosophy is don't take that 200 pound engineer and try to stick them in the 50 pound seat that's designed for their job is throw a be, fill a bus with bean bags, chairs and allow the individual to fit the job instead of trying to fit them into a very rigid role of this is your job and this is not.
And as all those gray areas get filled in, what you find is, is you get a lot better collaboration. , you get more creativity you get higher engagement. And ultimately what happens is, is you create this learning organization where people feel accountable and responsible for other people.
And they're working together, they're learning together that when you get a situation where there's more demand than supply, and people are really thinking, oh, maybe I should leave. Right? Which we saw, I think in the first portion of 2022, there was a higher demand and a lot of people were moving around.
The advantage of having the learning organization is because they're working collaborative. They're learning together. They're building their own personal brand, their knowledge base. They're making connections with network. All of this is happening as part of, delivering the product as well.
What happens is, is when the external pull is there. Those people are gonna really think hard about, boy, I can make an extra $20,000, or I can get, they give you an extra week, week off, or, this is a little more prestigious. People don't leave great teams.
The only time they really leave great teams is where there's another particular need that's driving them. Like, my wife's parents and family are in North Carolina and we're living in California, right. That, that there's a drive there. Or I've sent my kids off to Harvard and Yale and, I can't afford the hundred $50,000
So I, I need to figure out another way. There's usually some oth other draw. But if you have a great team and a great manager and they're developing. And you feel like it's a family, like it's truly like brothers and sisters as opposed to colleagues. It's gonna take a little bit more to drag you out of there to make that decision.
And quite often someone that's in a learning organization would probably tell you that they felt that it's more of a family than a job.
Yeah interesting, because I've had the experience as well I spent almost 12 years in Ikea, the furniture company, Uhhuh . And I believe that's also true learning organization, or at least was at that time.
And it feels like you break up with a spouse when you leave an organization. I have so many incredible friends and I'm still close with them being connected to them weekly though, that I'm not in that organization since 2019 anymore. Mm-hmm. . and yeah, it's incredible. If you as a leader of an organization, as the owner in that case, build something like that.
And if you do that intentionally, it's the most magnificent way of leading an organization, at least in my eye.
Yeah. And I would just piggyback on that is that what I found was by creating that organization, and remember what I told you, the first conversations I'd have with the new employees I don't want you working for me, you're not gonna work for me in 18 months from now.
It's is, is you create that environment and they see the value of that. What they do is it's, as a leader, it's building other leaders. They go off into this other organization. And what I found is, is they build the same kind of organization Yeah. That they just came out of Cause they saw the value and it, and it really just, proliferates like crazy.
And it's leading by example. It's by doing, not by saying it's getting them into the environment so they can feel. , know, and there's a difference between trying to motivate someone and inspiring 'em, inspiring people is you are there with them, right?
And they see you embracing what you're we're proposing. And I think people that try to be just motivational they say more than what they do. And I think that's really where you can tell who's a true leader and who's one that's just been anointed as a leader.
The interesting part for me is it can be so simple cuz it, it doesn't require you to be a PhD in leadership by just paying attention and being with the people, taking care of people. Just spending the 15 minutes and listening to someone who has a problem. It's not that difficult in one. It, it is not that
difficult.
And I think it goes back to our earlier conversation as. Particularly when I've worked with a lot of technical people, that 15 minutes or 30 minutes that they have, if you got a staff at 10, and you're really doing that on a regular basis. There's probably, 10 hours or whatever, five hours that you've spent.
The people that are very causational cause and effect relationship. They, they say at the end of the week, like, okay, well I spent 10 hours doing this and that was 10 hours less than they had working on it, so what did I get?
And they don't have that faith that the cheerleaders know that that will pay off at some point in time. So you have to be in that situation.
Yeah. So how do we link this back to the task quotient?
Yeah. So I'm gonna give the assessment away. Let, so let me talk about that just a little bit.
And then I'm also gonna give the people listening, the single question you can ask yourself that will tell you instantly whether you should be doing the work or delegating it. That's good. So there's only one question you need to ask yourself. And I'll then we'll talk about how that relates to the task portion.
The question is the current tasks that I am doing and by not giving it to someone else, am I restricting their personal or professional development and advancement, right? If I have somebody on my staff or a colleague that I know that by me doing this because. Oh God, I've done it a hundred times.
I'm really good at it. I can get it done in an hour. I'll take them three hours, so I'll just do it. The real question is, is there a value for them to be able to spend those three hours to learn? So the next time they have to do it, it's two and a half hours and eventually it's two hours and eventually it's, it's the same as me.
Is if, if you're doing tasks and people on your staff because they haven't been developed, whether it's skill or or you're, if you've given them a adequate time to, to do that. Is that any, any time that you're doing something that is restricting other, your ability to give others the chance to, to develop in advance?
A hundred percent should be. , you should be delegating a hundred percent of that and you should take the hit right now. Obviously if you know the house is on fire and and nobody else knows how to put it out and you need to do that, that's a different situation. You, you have to go and do that.
The thing is, is then you have to ask yourself after you put it out like, Hmm, why is there, is there no one else that could have done this? Maybe I need to, to do some development there. And, and what how that relates to kind of the task question is, is the task question assessment looks at the three types of tasks that we lo that all of us do.
So there's 496 different mixtures of tasks that we like to do. So there's routine tasks that we do. There's troubleshooting tasks and there's project tasks, and there's some great work that was done by Guy may name, bill Daniels wrote a wonderful book called Breakthrough Performance. Highly recommend that by American Training Consulting.
And Bill was a big consultant, did a lot of work for Intel when I was there, and I'd still consider him a good friend and a mentor. And what I recognized through the work that I had done for my dissertation was I wanted to show that how the, there was a relationship between.
Task preferences and motivation, engagement, job satisfaction and flow. I'm holding up the book flow. So it's getting in the zone. And that's, that's what I did. And I was fortunate enough to work with the author, Dr. Miha Chick sing Mihai to develop task quo assessment. He was part of my committee to do that.
And what we found was that, that if I can give you more of a mixture of the kind of tasks that you like, regardless of the work even if it's total crap work to do, if I can give you, if I know that you have a 50% preference for project work and I can allow you to do that and you have 30% routine work I can give you that in maybe 20% troubleshooting.
And once I, as a leader, I pay attention to. It also gives me a secondary view into the types of tasks that I just described on what to delegate and what to not right to, to help build leaders. And we've been using it, in my original research, I think we had 118 people, but we did all the quantitative research.
We've now extended that past 7,000, I think. And if I can, if you can determine your ideal mixture and kind of manage your day so you're getting more of a balance rather than, day one is I'm gonna do all project work and day two, I'm gonna figure out all the customer problems. And day three, I'm just gonna catch up on this 400,000 emails that I haven't read because I've been busy on day one and two.
And the thing is, is that if you can block your. More in segments that meet your mixture and you kind of figure out your cadence. So my cadence is I can do about two hours of project work, like heavy duty, design, creation, those kind of things. And a lot of times it, it'll expand beyond that and, and that's great.
But typically, I, I, you, you have to listen for those little red flags in your head where you want to get up and you want to make a phone call or read an email or go get something to drink or something to eat or walk around, whatever. That's an indication that you need to change not only the task, but you need to turn the task tight.
So if I'm working on project, that's my opportunity to go. To solve that problem downstairs where, the water heater's broken or what, or whatever. I'm gonna go do that or go do some routine work where I, read the, the emails that I do read, delete, read, delete, read, delete, read, delete.
Right? Which is more of a routine work. And once you block your time so that you, that you listen to the triggers and you know that the trigger means I need to do a different task type, which the assessment will tell you I can guarantee you statistically that I can raise your level of motivation, engagement.
And we also had some additional research that was done by another colleague of mine on empowerment, where you feel really much more empowered as well. So at the end of the day, even if you're doing stuff that is not particularly interesting to you we, we know that we can raise. , your satisfaction and satisfied employees are employees that are gonna stay.
And that helps, helps out. So I don't have to, continually have that revolving door of, of higher and fire or higher and lose.
Yeah. And I, I believe if you then do that with the whole team so that you understand all the different types and then you build a mix of the types, then you can build a team that is getting everything done.
And as the leader, you can advance the ball with the different people involved.
Yep. And one of the things we do is what we call a task. You know, We have a process usually a one day session that we've done, either remotely or in person, where everyone plots their tasks on this particular grid.
It identifies the things that are most motivating, most de-motivating, and with the manager in the room or on, on the call and the Zoom call what we do is anyone can sell any tasks that they don't want to do. They don't have to buy anything. Right. And then you capture everything in Excel sheet. And and then once every, everyone said, Hey, I don't like working on this project.
Says this is four hours of project work thing that I wanna sell. Right. And after you've captured all that for the entire team with the manager in the. , then you start the auction. Like who would buy, like to buy Yen's project A for, working with this client for assembling IKEA furniture, who's interest, who has an interested in assembly?
Like, oh, okay, I have an interest in in that, I'd like to buy, I'd like to buy that from, from Yen's. Okay, so you buy it and it goes on your plate. Or maybe you like hat doing half of it. I like doing the ordering piece. I don't like doing the assembly piece. Right. And you have that conversation in a very structured way.
And typically when we do this, it's not uncommon for us to to reallocate so you don't have to do a reorganization cause people hate reorganization. What you can't do is you do this rebalance of tasks and then typically we move in organizations that have similar kind of jobs. So customer support or design teams or, or manufacturing people.
Typically we can usually move like 60 to 75%. Right. And then there's always this bucket of, of crap work that people don't wanna do. . And every single time we've done this, I've been doing this for over 20 years with, with different teams, every time we do it, all of the, what happens is, is it's all a hundred percent administrative work that people don't want to do.
And what's happened is, is over time is as you're constantly shrinking that, that, that staff, you're cutting back and you're trying to do more with less people. Ultimately you end up paying a lot of very high pay people to do very low skilled tasks. And it doesn't come out cuz it's, it's about 30 minutes for me to run these copies, or it's 20 minutes for me to make these calls or whatever.
Once you look at a team, we did a whole case study on this. Once you look at a team, you realize there's probably 30 or 40 hours that this is, is done outsource it. Outsource it. Hire somebody, pay, pay them, $15 an hour instead of the $150 an hour you're paying for a senior design manager or engineer.
So, so you can save money, you can save time. And you, I I think hopefully everybody listening can imagine like, if, if everyone on the team got rid of all the work that they didn't want to do, you can imagine how motivating and engaging that would be. Absolutely. So, yeah, and, and, and typically it's, it's, it's a cost saving.
It's, it's, it's not a cost. So, yeah. I love
that idea.
It's a ton of fun. And because everyone has said what they want to do and what they don't want to do you get a hundred percent buy-in. Like you don't have to convince anybody cuz they have done all of the work. Once again, it goes back to the servant leadership model.
It's, I'm gonna let you be in control of your destiny. I will be there as the guidepost. Ultimately you're still gonna drive the bus.
Yeah. Great. So we will put the link into the show notes for everyone, the task quotient. I'm now eager to try it out myself. .
Good, good. I hope, I hope you will, will do that. So, yeah. Do you want, do you want me to, to, to tell you the link
verbally for those? You can, you can tell the link for those who are listening and Sure. We, we put it into the show notes as well.
Okay. Yeah, it's so I've created a, a link just, just for you.
It's you go to www dot magna, m a g n a, leader, l e a d e r, dot co, not com co. And then you put slash And this is an all caps gift, G I F T. Yeah. And if you do that, you'll get instant access to the task quotient. And within probably three to five minutes you can, you'll get the report back and it'll identify your ideal task mixture of what's the most motivating environment for you.
Very cool. Kevin, how can people reach out to you and where can people find you?
Well, if you wanna reach out to me, I'd love to have conversations. I'd love to help people. And my promises is if you send me an email or give me a call or whatever is I zero sales? I'm not gonna try to sell you anything.
I like helping people and if there's something that we can do that can help make your lives better, fantastic. And if not, I'm glad to just give them myself from a servant leadership model. So you can reach me at kevin@magnaleadership.com. And the other thing that we do, Jens, is that We're very active on social media Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn particular, and we have a Facebook group as well. All of those, I do research every morning. I post usually my. One to five articles along the line. So I, I'm doing all of the the pre-screening for you. Nobody's gonna get spammed. There's no selling that happens. So, and we've usually push them to all of the, the different feeds.
So if you're a, if you like Twitter, you can follow me at Dr. Kevin, spelled out. D o c t r k e v i n. We just hit 53,000 there. So good good subscribers if you want to, if you like LinkedIn, just go to magna leadership.com. I'm sorry. Just go to Magna Leadership, just type that in. You can find us there, follow us on our, on our business page where you can follow me directly and Kevin g.
and if you are a Facebook user, we have a Facebook page. And the Facebook page, just like LinkedIn is just Magna leadership as well as YouTube is magna leadership. So you'll be able to, so find us, subscribe to us. We got on YouTube, there's lots of great videos on all the different things that we include in our leadership academy.
A little tiny snippets. So, in fact there's a great one that we had done. I think it's a really good one on flow, right? Just creating this, this whole concept of flow and, and so, and, and there's one on the task question. So lots of really good. We try to make the video short, says a bunch of five to seven minute kind of things, so.
Great. Hopefully that'll, that'll be helpful to
them. Yeah. And I will definitely put everything into the show notes. Kevin, thank you very much for your time. It was a pleasure to have you on the show. Oh, thanks
for the opportunity.
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